Amazon blocks Meta's Muse agent from buying on its site
Amazon has cut Meta's Muse agent off from shopping on Amazon.com, saying the agent never identified itself and stores customers' credentials.
Anyone using Meta's Muse assistant to buy something on Amazon over the weekend ran into a wall. From Sunday night, Muse users were shown a popup reading: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed." Amazon has also asked Meta directly to take Amazon out of the Muse experience, a request Meta had not acted on by Monday.
Why Amazon shut the door
Amazon's objection is not that an AI agent browsed its store. It is that this one did so without telling anybody. The company says Meta never told it Muse would access Amazon.com, that the agent does not identify itself as automated while it browses, and that it appears to capture and store customer credentials, a combination Amazon describes as a privacy and security risk.
"We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate," an Amazon spokesperson said.
Amazon compares the arrangement to food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, or online travel agents and the airlines they book with, and says a shopping agent carries the same obligations. It points at its own agentic shopping feature, Buy for Me, which identifies itself and lets brands opt out.
Meta says Muse cannot see your passwords
Meta has previously insisted that Muse "has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods", and that credentials a user shares "go into secure storage, so Muse can use them without seeing them, including passwords a person types into the browser themselves". The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Partners everywhere else
The standoff is awkward because the two companies work together. Amazon products have been buyable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023, and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon's Graviton chips.
Amazon has spent a year pushing shopping agents away
This is the latest round in a longer fight over who owns the checkout. Amazon sued Perplexity over its Comet browser, won a preliminary injunction in March and lost it on 4 August, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user, not the AI company, was the one accessing Amazon's computers. The court denied Amazon's petition for rehearing on 10 September, but the ruling left contractual claims alive, and the message Muse users now see is built on Amazon's own terms rather than on hacking. Amazon has also moved to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI, and says it is in direct conversation with Meta.
Why the storefront is worth defending
Amazon's interest is not only sales. The company took in more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year, a business built on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products; an agent that goes straight to an item and asks for approval before buying collapses that funnel. Muse works the other way round: where a service offers an API the agent connects with credentials the user supplies, and where there is none, Meta says it browses the site the way a person would.
Our opinion
Amazon is using the one lever the courts left it. Having lost the anti-hacking argument, it has fallen back on its own terms of use, which is a private contract rather than a public right, and it happens to be a lever every large retailer holds. That does not make Amazon wrong about the substance: an agent that does not announce itself, keeps your password and spends your money is a genuinely new kind of visitor, and "we never agreed to this" is a defensible thing for a merchant to say.
It is also the clearest signal yet for anyone building a shopping agent. The API route is clean and consensual, but the browser route, the one Meta describes as shopping the way you would, runs straight into a shop owner's right to say no, and convenience does not change that. The interesting question is not whether Amazon wins this round. It is whether the next agent to arrive asks permission first, and that is a decision Meta and its rivals get to make before a retailer makes it for them.